Will John Kasich's Formidable Ground Game Carry Him in New Hampshire?

MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—This is how John Kasich knows he's got game. Ground game.

A political buddy from Ohio agrees to come to New Hampshire and knock on doors for him. Back home, the buddy's wife has sent 1,300 handwritten letters to New Hampshire voters asking for their vote. But now the buddy is standing in the middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire. He's cold and he's tired and he's looking at his smart phone and its detailed information about the resident of the next door he's supposed to knock on. And he's looking at that door, on an isolated house way down the end of the road. And he's thinking, how much do I love John Kasich? Enough to go on down that road? And he's thinking no way, and he turns and starts to walk away, and then he thinks again: How will I feel if he loses by one vote? So he sucks it up and trudges down the road and knocks on that door. And the woman who answers the door is friendly and welcoming even though she's a bit weary of all the candidate mailings and commercials and the associated political noise. But she's received one special piece of mail, she tells him, and she has it hanging on her refrigerator door. She invites him in to see it, and even though he's tired and cold he's just a little bit curious so he follows her inside and there in a kitchen in Nowhere, New Hampshire, tacked right up in a place of pride on the refrigerator door, is one of his wife's 1,300 handwritten letters.

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And that is how John Kasich knows he's got game.

He knows he's got game because more than 300 volunteers—many of them college students from Ohio, fresh off a long day of knocking on thousands of doors all over New Hampshire—showed up for a debate watch party on Saturday, and more than two hundred of them were still there to greet him when he showed up to thank them a few minutes before midnight. He knows he's got game because former New Hampshire Sen. Gordon Humphrey said it's the best ground game he's seen in 40 years, and he has to believe him because this is not the time for Humphrey to start blowing smoke. He knows he's got game because thousands and thousands of handwritten letters have been sent to New Hampshire from his Ohio supporters, letters that undecided voters, overwhelmed by the chatter and the static, can pick up and know they came from real people. On such details real choices hinge.

John Kasich's campaign makes its home in an antique colonial on Manchester's west side, the last holdout in a neighborhood obliterated in the twentieth century march of progress. Out front idle snowplows and industrial-sized piles of road salt are stored. An interstate bypass cuts mere feet from the side door, and high-tension wires hum overhead. Above it all is a Super PAC billboard, its message, "Donald Trump is unhinged—Jeb Bush," illuminated by three spotlights. Still its bones are good, with wide pine floorboards and millwork still intact. It also has interesting karma for a centrist rust belt governor who hopes to become first the Republican nominee, and then president, with crossover support. In the not-very-distant past, the house was home to Democrat Maggie Hassan's successful 2012 campaign for governor.

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A fading note is tacked to the red front door. Purporting to be from Kasich himself, although it seems unlikely that even the nuns could have taught a young boy such fine script, reads: "Door is not locked. Push to Open. We need all volunteers to get in—Thanks, John Kasich." And so they did, and are. Hours into election day, the phone banks hum—even as they are also doing in Kasich's Super-PAC offices in Ohio—in a full-court press to get every voter out. To independent voters who are going for Sanders, volunteers say, "Don't vote for Bernie—he's going to win. Make a difference with your vote. Stop Trump, and vote for Kasich."

The candidate himself has rarely been in residence. With the state of Ohio on successful autopilot, Kasich has spent much of the last few months traveling New Hampshire in his renovated Lady Antebellum tour bus (presumably not the same one that caught fire on the way to the AMC awards last spring) and holding 106 town hall events. (Scrappy to the bitter end, this afternoon, Gov. Chris Christie took a swing: "If Kasich went out and spoke to these people, they counted it. If he went to a restaurant and shook hands and took a question? Town hall," Christie complained. "So, you know, we let John feel the way he feels, but we spent more days here. We did more events here. This is day 72 here.") Fueled on red licorice and equal portions of cable news and the Golf Channel—which may account for his promise that President Kasich will reunite Pink Floyd—Kasich sought to take retail politics to new heights.

In Windham, at one of his last town halls yesterday, a young voter put an unexpected question to the candidate. Explaining she was "a still-undecided" voter choosing "between you, Hillary and Bernie Sanders," she asked, "Why should I vote for you in the Democratic primary tomorrow?"

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"Isn't that interesting," Kasich responded thoughtfully, deliberately deciding not to draw attention to her ignorance or her mistake. He tossed off a joke about Sanders and the presidency of Ben and Jerry's, then offered his take on the choices.

"Bernie's a socialist—that ain't gonna happen," Kasich declared, adding that Hillary Clinton would "run America with pollsters." He then offered a Three Bears assessment of the options.

"Hillary's too brittle. Bernie's way out here on the extreme. I'm the right porridge. One of them's too hot, the other one's too cold. But I've got the right temperature," a smiling Kasich said. The audience started to laugh and the young woman, blisfully ignorant how easily she could have been skewered in front of the audience and the C-SPAN cameras, promised to let Kasich know how she voted.

The game will change on the way to Super Tuesday, and a lot of it will take place in the air and on the airwaves. More attention means more questions, some of them very hard. In New Hampshire, Kasich only had to swing at softballs about why it took two months for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to tell Sebring residents of the high lead levels in their municipal water supply. Kasich's successful attempts to legislate and regulate against abortion rights in Ohio have also flown largely under the radar, as has his initial decision to refuse federal disaster relief after tornadoes ravaged Ohio in 2012. And the self-professed moderate, Kasich—who used to joke that he was Tea Party before there was a Tea Party—will be forced to explain why he relied on Tea Party support to help bring him to the governor's mansion in 2010.

No matter what happens tonight, John Kasich already knows his ground game has paid off for him. At the stroke of midnight, the residents of Dixville Notch, a tiny resort town 20 miles from the Canadian boarder, cast their ballots and five minutes later they are counted. The Balsams Grant Resort Hotel, the grand hotel where voters historically cast their ballots, was sold and shuttered nearly five years ago and awaits a $143 million make-over. Unlike in years past, when George W. Bush stopped for Ellie Pearson's apple crisp and Ronald Reagan had to be prompted to accept a balloon from a little girl, Kasich was the only candidate who made it up here this year.

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"Dixville Notch is, like, are you kidding? That's the holy grail of elections," Kasich told an interviewer earlier this month. "Since I'm the only one that went, maybe I'm going to swing Dixville Notch."

When Kasich's wife woke him up at 5:30 this morning, he found out he'd done exactly that. When all five Republican ballots were counted, Kasich beat Trump three to two. Game, for the moment, over.

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